Mick Hartley

Jonathan Sacerdoti in the Spectator on the latest UN report, accusing Israel of a genocide in Gaza, deliberately targeting children:

Throughout the report, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad – tens of thousands of fighters who spent seventeen years burying weapons, tunnels and command posts beneath homes, schools, mosques and hospitals – simply vanish from the page. Strip the enemy out of a war and every dead child looks like a deliberate execution rather than what war actually is: chaotic and lethal. The Commission then quietly invents a new rule of war, treating any Israeli strike on a position embedded with civilians as proof of intent to kill those civilians.This is a standard no army on earth has ever been held to.

None of this is to wave away the deaths of real children, which are a genuine tragedy. But an allegation this serious demands proof equally as serious. The Commission has none, and chose to publish anyway.

This, in fact, is the point of the exercise. A UN Commission of Inquiry is not just a press release, it is a sort of laundering operation. Activist claims, unverified family testimony and hospital hearsay that would never survive a courtroom go in one end; out the other comes a glossy document bearing the UN crest and the imprimatur of “independent” experts.

That manufactured credibility is then handed to the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice as if it were vetted fact, because judges and journalists alike assume the UN has already done the hard work of verification. But it hasn’t. The public sees “UN report finds Israel deliberately killed children” and takes it as established truth, when an advocacy narrative has simply been given a UN letterhead. That is how bias gets dressed up as authority – and how a country can be convicted in the court of world opinion before any real court has heard a shred of tested evidence. Worse still, these reports will be used as ‘evidence’ in real courts, and nobody will question it because it came from the UN.

This isn’t new for the UN, which only recently attacked Israel over a separate, equally damaging allegation: that Israeli forces and detention facilities were guilty of systematic conflict-related sexual violence, serious enough that Secretary-General António Guterres placed Israel on a UN blacklist alongside Hamas, Isis and Boko Haram. Asked at the press conference unveiling that report whether she had personally examined the underlying evidence, the UN’s own Special Representative on sexual violence, Pramila Patten, replied: “It’s not the responsibility of my office to do any verification.” Pushed on whether she’d seen the raw evidence, she said simply: “No, because it’s not my job.”

See here for the true face of the UN. Reem al_Salem, “the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls” no less, who denies Hamas sexual violence, is confronted by an Israeli survivor of Hamas rape. “Why were you silent?”. Will you apologise?” Nothing. Still silent.